How the free market found a workaround for Obamacare--and how Obama killed it

To know the full depth to which the Democrats have tried to control every aspect of your life with the abomination called Obamacare, you need to hear the story below:

Emperor Obama promised that Obamacare would save the average family $2,500 a year on health insurance.  This turned out to be one of a long list of whopping lies, as families soon learned.  Despite Obama's endlessly-repeated promise that "If you like your policy you can keep it," millions of Americans had their policies cancelled--because they didn't comply with the thousands of ridiculous rules the emperor's minions wrote to enact the new law.

For example, every Obamacare policy had to provide free birth control to the holder--regardless of age or sex.  That sort of idiocy.

Most policies had huge deductibles--$10,000 or more--meaning they wouldn't pay a cent until the family had spent that much out of their own pocket in a single year.  And after the first year, premiums started climbing by 50 percent or more per year.

And keep in mind that this law demanded that everyone had to buy a "compliant" policy, or else pay a penalty on your income tax.  (The supreme court had decided that the penalty was actually a tax, even though Obama's own lawyers had argued vehemently before the court that it was NOT a tax.)

Democrats never imagined that any company would continue to sell health policies that didn't comply with all the Dems thousands of rules, because anyone who bought such a policy would STILL have to pay the penalty.  Besides, ruling by decree that companies couldn't sell any other kind of policy might have clued even the dumbest Democrat congresswhore that this was an overreach.

As a result, clever, budget-strapped American families started buying policies that were "catastrophic insurance" only--you paid for regular care, and the policy only paid if you had a really major illness.  These policies were routine before Obamacare, so companies knew their economics very well.  As a result, they cost far less than "compliant" policies that included all the lard the bureaucrats demanded to please snowflakes--like sex-change counseling, for example.

Americans who bought these policies still had to pay the penalty, of course, but even after the penalty they still saved thousands of dollars per year compared to buying an Obamacare policy.   Brilliant.

But bureaucrats don't like to be outsmarted, so you can guess how they reacted, right?  In October 2016 the Obama administration issued a rule limiting so-called "non-compliant plans" to a three-month life, rather than the usual year. 

The rule was specifically designed to force these people back onto the ObamaCare "health-insurance exchanges."  Or as Obama's minions at Health and Human Services cleverly worded it,

 "The proposed changes will help strengthen the [ObamaCare] risk pool by ensuring that short-term limited duration plans are used only as intended, to fill truly temporary gaps in coverage."

Wait...the rule didn't limit "short-term" plans, but full year plans.  So this is blowing smoke.  In reality the Obama administration wanted to kill the clever, efficient, market-derived solution to their overpriced, crappy, mandatory policies. 

Can't have anything that results in government "solutions" competing with the free market, eh citizen?  Cuz that might show how bad the....wait, better not finish that sentence.

Similarly, before Obamacare many trade and professional organizations--real estate agents, court reporters, small business associations and the like--would negotiate lower rates from big health-insurance companies.  Obamacare made that illegal--because forcing everyone to get insurance as individuals would increase revenue from the "risk pool."

Trump has proposed to eliminate both these regulations.  Good deal for Americans, so naturally Democrat congresswhores are screaming like stuck pigs. 

But remember, citizen:  The Democrat party is always looking out for your interests.  They'll protect you from the confusion caused by those nasty tax cuts or unfair bonuses only handed out to employees of certain companies.  They'll make sure all taxes are paid by American corporations!  Yeh, dat's it.  Make dem eeeebil bidnessmen pay!

Okay, now for an example from before the emperor.  In fact from before any of today's college students were born.

Back when the feds first made seatbelts mandatory, surveys found--to their amazement--that many people weren't using 'em.  So the federal department of transportation made a RULE that every car sold in the U.S. had to have a circuit that would prevent the car from starting unless all seatbelts were buckled.

There!  That'll get those stubborn dummies to do as we demand!

Of course that required all seatbelts to have circuitry to tell when they were connected.  But that only adds a few bucks to the cost of the car, so....  And of course eventually one of those microswitches or wires will break, which means...your car won't start.

Okay, so a few people a year get inconvenienced.  So what?  Small price to pay to get people to wear seatbelts.

Can you guess what happened next? 

Sure you can:  People got around the circuit by simply leaving the seatbelts connected all the time and stuffing the connected belts down the seat crack.

Bureaucrats were furious!  So they made a NEW rule, requiring that all cars sold in the U.S. had to have a circuit that was smart enough to keep people from doing this.  In other words, it had to detect that the seatbelt was connected after a person's fanny hit the seat.

Clever, eh?

Of course that meant adding 1) weight sensors in the seats; 2) more wires; and 3) a relay to ensure that the weight sensor closed before the belt was connected.  But this only added a few bucks to the cost, so....  And critics pointed out that the more complex it got, the more people would find their cars refusing to start.  Or how about when a driver put a bag of groceries or a briefcase in the passenger seat, and then was surprised when the car didn't start?

Now:  As a pilot I'm all for seatbelts.  The reason for the story is that this pattern by bureaucrats is repeated again and again, but the bureaucrats rarely learn to anticipate the workaround.  And the public always falls for the next politician who proposes a faaabulous program to do...whatever.